Author: Heather Schroeder

Some companies have a structured system for how they treat internships during the actual internship and after the internship in the form of giving offers. For example, (and I know this from living with two P&G interns) P&G will contact their interns going into their senior year of college to let them know if they are getting a job offer or not (the timing of the call is different depending on the department). At P&G, there is a structure on how to handle all of the talented interns that just finished their summer at P&G. At Luxottica, there’s no structure. There’s no formal offer/offer call and getting an extension for your internship fully depends on the brand team that you are on. At companies like Lux, it’s completely on you to take the reins and steer the conversation toward full time employment if that’s something you are interested in. Here’s some tips on how to do that:

Ask your recruiter or your contact in HR when they normally do recruiting for full time hires. Recruiters are in charge of filling any opening throughout the company. Getting to know people in the HR department and letting them know you’re interested is a good first step in getting a full time job. Make sure to ask your recruiter how often you should keep in touch with them and what you can do in your senior year to make yourself more marketable.

Bring up the full time hire conversation with your manager. Your manager knows your work better than anyone else at the company and is the best reference to recommend you to get an offer in your department or to recommend you to someone in another department in the company.

Keep in touch. This is the tip that seems the most obvious, but it’s one that you can easily forget to do as time goes on. The HR professionals that I met with throughout the summer recommended sending out an email to HR once a month and an email to your manager once every one to two months to stay in contact. It’s even better if you can connect your email to something that relevant with the business. For example, from my work this summer, I know that I certain marketing campaign will take place later in the year, so when I email my manager I’m going to be sure to ask about that campaign.

The end of my internship is almost here (holy crap that went fast), and with the end an internship comes the final presentation. Most major companies will have their interns present what they accomplished during the summer and their major projects to their teams. Each company approaches intern final presentations differently. For example, my roommate working at P&G only has to present to four people, but those four people are pretty high up in the company. At Lux, I’m presenting to my entire brand team (around 25 people), which includes managers and higher leadership, as well as the recruiting team, and any other Lux employee that wants to stop in and listen.

Regardless of the final presentation structure, you definitely want to end on a great note and rock your presentation. Here are some tips I’ve discovered to help you do just that:

Go through the template of what to include in your presentation and start inputting your information (whether it’s on a hard copy or on your computer). It helped me to get all the content I wanted to cover written down first, and organize it later.

Run through the content you want to present with your manager. She can correct terminology and give feedback on how much time to spend talking about a particular project.

Meet with other interns in your department. I met with the two other interns on the Target Optical brand to share our ideas for what we need to cover in our presentation, what format to use, and other feedback we had received from our managers.

Practice! Run through your presentation by yourself a couple times, then reserve a room to practice it out loud in front of your manager or other interns.

And on the day of your presentation…

You’ve been working on your projects all summer. You know them inside and out; it should be easy to talk about them. All you have to do now is brag yourself up showing everyone what a great job you did!

If you happen to eavesdrop on any sort of meeting about strategy or creative review at Target Optical, you will most likely hear the phrase, “What’s your point of view?” Your point of view (or more commonly known as POV; acronyms are huge here) is exactly what it sounds like: your opinion and thoughts on the strategy to a specific project.

From working here, I realized how important it is to have a POV. When my manager asks me my thoughts on messaging strategy options, she doesn’t want to hear, “Oh I like all of the ideas” or “I don’t think it really matters which one we use”. She wants to hear my opinion. More importantly, she wants to hear my reasoning as to how I came to that opinion.

At first the whole POV thing threw me off; it just seemed way too subjective. As my internship progressed, though, I finally understood it. Thinking through your POV helps you align with the overall strategy of the project; it helps you develop reasons as to why you think the way you do and how that relates to the overall objective. Having a POV also shows your team members that you are engaged with and care about what you are working on-never a bad thing!

I bet that your company will be asking for your POV too, even if they don’t explicitly use the phrase POV. And you better be prepared with an answer when do.

Ask questions– You’re not expected to know everything coming into your internship. Case and point- I was having trouble dialing into my first conference call by myself, so I asked an associate in the nearest cubicle to the conference room to help me dial in. I was hesitant to bother someone working to ask for help, but asking questions or for help is a great way to learn.

But take time to digest what you are learning –Listen up when you are in meetings so you don’t ask questions that you would already know the answers to if you were just paying attention the first time.

Ask for more– Managers set aside specific projects for you to do as an intern, but as they don’t know your work speed or efficiency you might get ahead on some projects or finish them early all together. Ask your manager what else you can do. It shows initiative. Plus the best way to get offered a job is to integrate yourself as much as you can into as many projects as you can.

Connect with your coworkers– It doesn’t all have to be about work! Obviously, everyone wants to work with people they actually like. Take time to form friendships with your coworkers by talking about each other’s weekends or grabbing a drink after work.

Stay organized- At a corporate level, there can be a lot going on. In order for me stay on top of my projects I updated an A3 document weekly for each of my projects. Each week I documented what I got done the previous week and what my next steps were in order for me to complete my projects by the end of my internship. This helped my manager gain visibility to what I spent most of my time working on. It will also help me when I start working on my final presentation because I have a lot of big milestones of my projects already written down.

This week marks the halfway point for my internship. I can’t believe how fast this summer is flying by! But I can honestly say that deciding to move to Cincinnati for the summer and work at Luxottica is definitely in my mental “Top 5 Best Decisions I’ve Ever Made” list. Here’s why:

The Real World Experience-I have learned so much more about marketing in the short five weeks I’ve been here than I ever could have gotten in the classroom. I can’t even begin to emphasize how beneficial this internship has been in regards to giving me more talking points for future interviews. Also, marketing as a major is so broad; there is so much you can do with a marketing degree. It’s awesome to have context to what marketing looks like at a corporate level.

So Much Learning-I’m not just talking learning about marketing and how it plays a role in business. Luxottica as a whole pushes learning personally and professionally making it an amazing company to work for. Each month there are “Learn It” classes to sign up for taught by one of the thousands of associates here. I’ve been to classes about communicating (we played euchre!) and about external factors that affect business profit. Also, there are many different brands you can work on at Luxottica, and every single person that I’ve met here has worked on more than one brand. Luxottica actually encourages associates switching roles within the organization, because the company realizes that’s how its employees learn and grow. In addition to the classes and the culture, my day to day work has taught me so much about how to conduct a meeting, how to connect with coworkers, and how best to collaborate cross functionally.

The People-Every person that I’ve met in Cincinnati has been awesome. I’ve meet a lot of other interns (mostly interns from P&G-there’s SO many of them) through living at Xavier University for the summer, and they all have been great to hang out with on the weekdays and go out with and explore Cincinnati with on the weekends. The people I’ve met at work are just as awesome. I have yet to meet someone at Luxottica who didn’t offer their help or guidance. Literally every single person has been nothing but nice and helpful. I know that’s rare for a company of this size. My intern class is just as awesome. It has been a lot of fun getting to know each other; it’s definitely going to be sad saying good-bye at the end of the summer.

Becoming more independent-When I came to OSU, a lot of my closest friends came with me, and I was only two hours away from home. If I needed a familiar face or needed to head home spur of the moment one day, it wasn’t that hard to do. Moving to Cincinnati was different. I was farther from home, and I didn’t know anyone. This forced me to rely on myself a little more than what I’m used to, and I became more independent because of it. I like knowing I can move to a new city and establish myself by myself.

The City-There’s so much to do in Cincinnati. It’s a fun and vibrant city, and I’m having the best time exploring it.

This summer has been awesome so far; moving here might actually take the #2 spot on my list-right after my decision to become a Buckeye and attend The Ohio State University for undergrad.